Developed from a memorable series of lectures delivered in San Francisco, which included a legendary symposium at the Palace of Fine Arts with astronaut Rusty Schweickart, Joseph Campbell’s last book explores the space age. Campbell posits that the newly discovered laws of outer space are actually at work within human beings as well and that a new mythology is implicit in this realization. He examines the new mythology and other questions in these essays which he described as "a broadly shared spiritual adventure."

EXCERPT

Myth and the Body

Reviewing with unprejudiced eye the religious traditions of mankind, one becomes very soon aware of certain mythic motifs that are common to all, though differently understood and developed in the differing traditions: ideas, for example, of a life beyond death, or of malevolent and protective spirits. Adolf Bastian (1826‒1905), a medical man, world traveler, and leading ethnologist of the nineteenth century, for whom the chair in anthropology at the University of Berlin was established, termed these recurrent themes and features “elementary ideas,” Elementargedanken, designating as “ethnic” or “folk ideas,” Völkergedanken, the differing manners of their representation, interpretation, and application in the arts and customs, mythologies and theologies, of the peoples of this single planet.

Such a recognition of two aspects, a universal and a local, in the constitution of religions everywhere clarifies at one stroke those controversies touching eternal and temporal values, truth and falsehood, which forever engage theologians; besides setting apart, as of two distinct yet related sciences, studies on the one hand of the differing “ethnic” or “folk ideas,” which are the concern properly of historians and ethnologists, and on the other hand, of the Elementargedanken, which pertain to psychology. A number of leading psychologists of the past century addressed themselves to the analysis of these universals, of whom Carl G. Jung (1875‒1961), it seems to me, was the most insightful and illuminating. The same mythic motifs that Bastian had termed “elementary ideas,” Jung called “archetypes of the collective unconscious,” transferring emphasis, thereby, from the mental sphere of rational ideation to the obscure subliminal abysm out of which dreams arise.

For myths and dreams, in this view, are motivated from a single psychophysiological source—namely, the human imagination moved by the conflicting urgencies of the organs (including the brain) of the human body, of which the anatomy has remained pretty much the same since c. 40,000 b.c. Accordingly, as the imagery of a dream is metaphorical of the psychology of its dreamer, that of a mythology is metaphorical of the psychological posture of the people to whom it pertains. The sociological structure coordinate to such a posture was termed by the Africanist Leo Frobenius (1873‒1938) a cultural “monad.”

Every feature of such a social organism is, in his sense, expressive and therefore symbolic of the informing psychological posture. In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler (1880‒1936) identified eight colossal monads of great majesty, with a ninth now in formation, as having shaped and dominated world history since the rise, in the fourth millennium b.c., of the first literate high cultures —(1) the Sumero-Babylonian, (2) the Egyptian, (3) the Greco-Roman (Apollonian), (4) the Vedic-Aryan, of India, (5) the Chinese, (6) the Maya-Aztec-Incan, (7) the Magian (Persian-Arabian, Judeo-Christian-Islamic), (8) the Faustian (Gothic-Christian to modern European-American), and now, beneath the imposed alien crust of a Marxian cultural pseudomorphosis, (9) the germinating Russian-Christian.1
Long antecedent, however, to the world-historical appearances, flowerings, and inevitable declines of these monumental monads, an all but timeless period is recognized of nonliterate, aboriginal societies—some nomadic hunters, others settled horticulturalists; some of no more than a half dozen related families, others of tens of thousands. And each had its mythology—some, pitifully fragmentary, but others, marvelously rich and magnificently composed. These mythologies were all conditioned, of course, by local geography and social necessities. Their images were derived from the local landscapes, flora and fauna, from recollections of personages and events, shared visionary experiences, and so forth. Narrative themes and other mythic features, furthermore, have passed from one domain to another.

However, the definition of the “monad” is not a function of the number and character of such influences and details, but of the psychologi-cal stance in relation to their universe of the people, whether great or small, of whom the monad is the cohering life. The study of any mythology from the point of view of an ethnologist or historian, therefore, is of the relevance of its metaphors to a disclosure of the structure and force of the nucleating monad by which every feature of the culture is invested with its spiritual sense. Out of this emerge the forms of its art, its tools, and its weapons, ritual forms, musical instruments, social regulations, and ways of relating in war and in peace to its neighbors.

In terms of Bastian’s vocabulary, these monads are local organizations of the number of “ethnic” or “folk ideas” of the represented cultures, constellating variously in relation to current needs and interests the primal energies and urges of the common human species: bioenergies that are of the essence of life itself, and which, when unbridled, become terrific, horrifying, and destructive.

The first, most elementary and horrifying of all, is the innocent voraciousness of life, which feeds on lives and provides the first interest of the infant feeding on its mother. The peace of sleep shatters in nightmare into apparitions of the cannibal ogress, cannibal giant, or approaching crocodile, which are features, also, of the fairy tale. In Dionysiac orgies the culminating frenzies issue still, in some parts of the world, in the merciless group-cannibalizing of living bulls. The most telling mythological image of this grim first premise of life is to be seen in the Hindu figure of the world-mother herself as Kålæ, “Black Time,” licking up with her extended, long, red tongue the lives of all the living of this world of her creation. For, as noticed in a paper on ritual killing by Adolf E. Jensen, the late director of the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt-am-Main, “It is the common mark of all animal life that it can maintain itself only by destroying life;” citing to this point an Abyssinian song in celebration of the joys of life: “He who has not yet killed, shall kill. She who has not yet given birth shall bear.”

The second primal compulsion, linked almost in identity with the first (as recognized in this Abyssinian paean), is the sexual, generative urge, which during the years of passage out of infancy comes to knowledge with such urgency that in its seasons it overleaps the claims even of the first. For here the species talks. The individual is surpassed. In the quiver of the Hindu god Kåma, whose name means “desire” and “longing,” and who is a counterpart of Cupid—no child, however, but a splendid youth, emitting a fragrance of blossoms, dark and magnificent as an elephant stung with vehement desire—there are five flowered arrows to be sent flying from his flowery bow, and their names are “Open Up!” “Exciter of the Paroxysm of Desire,” “The Inflamer,” “The Parcher,” and “The Carrier of Death.” Orgies of whole companies overtaken by the released zeal of the arrows of this god are reported from every quarter of the globe.

A third motivation, which has been the unique generator of the action on the stage of world history—since the period, at least, of Sargon I of Akkad, in southern Mesopotamia, c. 2300 b.c.—is the apparently irresistible impulse to plunder. Psychologically, this might perhaps be read as an extension of the bioenergetic command to feed upon and consume; however, the motivation here is not of any such primal biological urgency, but of an impulse launched from the eyes, not to consume, but to possess. An ample anthology of exemplary texts to this purpose, readily at hand, will be found in the Bible; for example:

When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than yourselves, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them; then you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. You shall not make marriages with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons. For they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods; then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you utterly. But thus shall you deal with them; you shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and hew down their Asherim, and burn their graven images with fire. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth. (Deuteronomy 7:1‒6)